'When
[my father] was wounded at Somme he was brought home and placed in a chair
outside the front door, dressed in uniform by his mother because he couldn't
lift his arm...The women in the neighbourhood who had lost husbands or
sons - [who had only been] told that they were missing or killed in action
- queued up to ask this 19-year-old what had really happened to them...it
was a horrendous thing to have to do.'

'When [I] read sentences
from [Wilfred Owen's and David Jones's] poems, occasionally it sounded
just like my father talking. The poetry makes me feel - because of the
shared experience - very close to my father.' - John Walker

Walker associates
the sheep-skull headed soldier with his father. A skull is an empty shell,
a husk. Walker's soldier/father figures are physically and mentally shells
of their former selves.

The artist has heard
of soldiers at Verdun who bleated like sheep on the way to the front,
'lest their officers think the soldiers were unaware of their fate,' and
has recalled a comparison of officers to 'Judas sheep': sheep kept to
entice other sheep into the abattoir.

A sheep's skull also
carries older associations with sacrificial animals, which was why early
Christians chose the sheep as the symbol of Christ as a sacrifice to God,
and is probably why Walker puts a figure with a sheep's skull against
the background of crosses on page 25.

On the last page of
Passing Bells is Walker's familiar image of himself at his easel, but
this time his head is a sheep's skull too, a sign of loving identification
with his father.